Bandwith usage calculation and logs

Webcart

Verified User
Joined
Jan 14, 2004
Messages
398
Hello,

I wonder how the bandwidth is calculated both server-wide and for user/resellers statistics. I mean, are FTP transfers counted? What about SMTP/POP3? And I guess the most difficult without dedicated IP is SSH tunneling. It's technically possible to use SSH for transferring big amount of data. Does it get counted somehow?

On the same note, is there a way to see SMTP/POP3/FTP logs via Admin panel? If not, where the logs are located and what program could be used to analyze them?

I use sma to analyze sendmail's logs on other boxes, but I don't think it will work on this one. Please advise.

Thank you.
 
Hello,

Right now DA counts the bandwidth for httpd, ftp and DA and we are going to add smtp/pop asap. Exim doesn't really have a pretty bytes-log option (that I've seen), so a simple script parser is required. If your users are using things like wget to transfer data, DA doesn't really have a method to monitor that, so it would go unnoticed.

I think it might be handy to break down the usages (both bandwidth and ftp) so that admin/reseller/users can see exactly whats going on, in case one is being "abuse" or just used more than others.

John
 
Thank you for your answer.

I think the most easiest and errors-free way to count bandwidth usage is SNMP, provided that any user has dedicated IP.

Right now, I can set up SNMP daemon and collect statistics, but this data doesn't get used by DA and will not suspend offending accounts automatically.

My question about logs was completely unrelated to bandwidth issue, though. Logs analysis is an important part of server security: they allow you to get prepared for brute force/DoS attacks or usage abuse by the users.
I use sma to get daily report of all mail-related activities on boxes where sendmail is installed. It can show for example how many attempts to send mail w/o proper authentification were made and from what IP addresses. It also shows statistics for top senders/recipients/envelope pairs and more.
Since I don't have any experience with Exim nor ProFTP I was hoping someone could shed a light on this for me.
 
Webcart said:
Thank you for your answer.

I think the most easiest and errors-free way to count bandwidth usage is SNMP, provided that any user has dedicated IP.

Right now, I can set up SNMP daemon and collect statistics, but this data doesn't get used by DA and will not suspend offending accounts automatically.
Might I know how you do this? Setting up the SNMP daemon I mean, since I use cacti to poll a switch I'm interested in polling the DA server for some statistics as well. This reduces load on the server itself since an SNMP query is much less resource intensive then MRTG / cacti itself.
 
S2S-Robert said:
Might I know how you do this? Setting up the SNMP daemon I mean, since I use cacti to poll a switch I'm interested in polling the DA server for some statistics as well. This reduces load on the server itself since an SNMP query is much less resource intensive then MRTG / cacti itself.

It would depend on OS you use :)
For example, for Fedora core 1, grab net-snmp packages from here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/

Now, you have to create snmpd.conf file and put it into appropriate directory. I don't remember all the details, but

man snmpd.conf

should be enough to get you started with basic configuration.
There is also a perl script which can help you build an snmpd.conf file. Run:
Code:
snmpconf -g basic_setup


Hope that helps.
 
Webcart said:
It would depend on OS you use :)
For example, for Fedora core 1, grab net-snmp packages from here: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/

Now, you have to create snmpd.conf file and put it into appropriate directory. I don't remember all the details, but

man snmpd.conf

should be enough to get you started with basic configuration.
There is also a perl script which can help you build an snmpd.conf file. Run:
Code:
snmpconf -g basic_setup


Hope that helps.
Yes, I've started using snmpconf, but somehow it's not that clear to me. Do you have your version of snmpd.conf (stripped of passwords ofcourse) somewhere that I can have a look at?

You did make it work for statistics as uptime / memory usage / cpu usage etc. right?
 
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